Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 25

COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

In the third example, the power of vertical media is,
in effect, being replaced by a rising, alternative community agenda. This has implications for social organizations from communities to entire nations. If the
correlational agreement between vertical media and
audiences declines, then leadership c onfronts challenges in maintaining influence. Otherwise, as figure 4 indicates, the organizational values may be in a potentially
transitional drift (as with a correlation of .50).
Figure 4 shows a range of hypothetical correlations
from 1.00 to 0. (Correlations can also be negative—not
considered here.) Figure 4 also illustrates the evolution
of a social system from dominant vertical media agendas to dominant horizontal media agendas. Leaders
can use this method to estimate where their own
organizations fit in the dynamics of agendamelding and
civic balance. Surveys might show a high correlation
between leaders’ and subordinates’ views about the importance of organizational issues and goals (similar to
the first example in figure 4). However, if the correlations drop sharply from generals to field grade officers
and senior enlisted, and then to junior officers and enlisted, that might indicate that efforts to influence subordinates are not effective. In this case, everyone would
be in the Army but not everyone would, in a sense, be
living in the same agenda community—a significant
difference with potentially far-reaching repercussions
for all levels of command.

The United States and Iran:
Examples of Agenda Community
Attraction
The ACA formula illustrates how audiences meld
vertical and horizontal agendas differently and how
social systems evolve as a result. Leaders seeking to
influence their organizations need to understand how
people use media differently, not just by age but also by
political beliefs and cultural identity. Otherwise, leaders might risk far more than failing to influence. This
section illustrates the operation of the ACA formula
first, by analyzing three U.S. presidential elections.
Then, it describes a historical case study from Iran
about a leader who lost power when he disregarded
how the people he sought to influence shared information and melded their own views.
Studies of U.S. voters. In the original agenda-setting study in Chapel Hill, during the 1968 presidential
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2015

election between Hubert Humphrey and Richard
Nixon, university professors and researchers Maxwell
E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw found a correlation
between local media and voters in the ranking of important issues of .97.15
Shaw and others replicated the Chapel Hill study
forty years later in the campaign season leading up to
the 2008 presidential election between Barack Obama
and John McCain. A content analysis of local media
and personal interviews was conducted with a stratified sample of seventy Chapel Hill voters to determine
the correlation between issues deemed important by
the media and by voters. The correlational agreement
stood at .87.
The lead author of this study, with Chris Vargo
of the University of Alabama and other scholars, ran
another test in a 2012 presidential election study of
social media using Twitter. They used a large sample of
13,116,850 tweets to calculate the correlations between the issues tweeted by vertical media (expressing
the messages of traditional, top-down news media),
horizontal media (expressing the collective messages of
social media communities), and issues tweeted by individuals (expressing individuals’ personal perspectives).
The correlation for Twitter users with vertical media
tweets in the week preceding the election stood at .98.
Using the ACA formula, figure 5 shows the
relative contribution of traditional media sources,
collective social media community sources, and personal, individual views across these three elections.16
Traditional media remained powerful even with the
rise of social media.
However, Democratic, Republican, and independent voters used traditional and social media differently
in 2008, as did Democrats and Republicans in 2012.
(The researchers did not study independent voters in
2012 and did not study social media in 1968.) This is
depicted in figure 6.17
The broad conclusion is that traditional media
remain powerful, but their audiences are not passive;
voters meld agenda communities from traditional and
social media sources that fit their personal preferences.
Additionally, most likely, everyone mixes traditional
and social media messages in making important decisions—soldiers as well as voters.
Study in Agenda Setting from Iran. In the 1970s,
the Iranian mass media—newspapers, magazines, radio,
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